Recently, digital cameras have been gaining more popularity among users. Also, there has been a ceaseless increase in recording capacity provided to recording media. Such trends have brought about an increase in the number of images owned by a single user.
Among methods for supporting users in searching for and determining an image that he or she would like to view from among such an increasing number of images, one commonly-known method is a method of providing an evaluation and a rank to each of the images in a user's collection.
One example of such a method of evaluating and ranking images is a method of obtaining, for each image, a value indicating evaluation by performing calculation according to the number of times certain operations (printing, slideshow viewing, and etc.) have been performed with respect to the image (refer to Patent Literature 1).
In addition, there is another method of obtaining a value indicating a certain characteristic of an image by performing calculation, and further statistically obtaining a probability of whether or not the image will be selected for viewing by the user according to the value indicating a characteristic of the image (refer to Patent Literature 2).
Further in addition, yet another method of evaluating and ranking images is a method of detecting an orientation of one or more faces included in an image, and further obtaining a value indicating evaluation of the image according to the orientation so detected (refer to Patent Literature 3). When applying this method, an image having one or more faces which are oriented more towards the front of the image is provided with a high value of evaluation.